Peter & Paul pay tribute to Mary

Thursday

Apr 28, 2011 at 12:01 AMApr 28, 2011 at 4:04 AM

When Peter Yarrow and Noel “Paul” Stookey take the stage this weekend in Springfield, Ill., it will be among the last opportunities to see them performing together. The men — two-thirds of the folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary — are billing the show as a tribute to the late Mary Travers, who died in 2009.

Brian Mackey

When Peter Yarrow and Noel “Paul” Stookey take the stage this weekend in Springfield, Ill., it will be among the last opportunities to see them performing together.

The men — two-thirds of the folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary — are billing the show as a tribute to the late Mary Travers, who died in 2009.

“These are opportunities to share a goodbye with an audience,” Stookey said in a recent telephone interview.

“The audience, by the time we move towards the end, is really primed to participate, themselves. Starting with ‘Jet Plane,’ we encourage them to sing Mary’s part,” he said. “Peter and I essentially sing the harmony parts to it.”

Stookey said neither he nor Yarrow would feel comfortable making a career of this, so once they’ve played one of the concerts in a city, they do not go back. He said they are down to perhaps six or eight performances a year, and they will be done for good this year or next.

“It’s not like the Frank Sinatra forever farewell tour,” he said. “We don’t want to turn Mary’s passing into a career. It may be presumptuous on my part, but I think we — as the audience — would prefer to see the trio end when the trio ended.”

Was it a difficult decision to keep on performing without Mary?

“Oh no. Oh no, no, no,” he said. “We have always been very individual. It was very serendipitous that the name chosen (Peter, Paul & Mary) indicates that there are three individuals. Not only was that symbolically expressed in our concerts, where we would each do a solo section, but in our personal lives, anyway.”

The side of works

For Noel “Paul” Stookey, his solo work has long been closely tied to his religious faith as a born-again Christian.

To that end, he’s spent about 40 years presenting multi-faith readings and music, “so that people have a sense that we are, at the heart of the matter, united by this strange and mysterious thing called ‘Love,’” he said, noting that he generally spells the word with a capital L.

Among the members of Peter, Paul & Mary, Stookey has been the most active in recording solo work.

“All the songs proceeding from ‘The Wedding Song’ in 1970 on out have been a reflection of how I feel we’re called to reconnect with our creator — however we term that to be, whatever meaning we give that to be,” Stookey said.

Stookey seems careful to strike inclusive, humble notes when describing his faith: “in my particular case” and “however we term that to be.” It’s a far cry from the foot-in-the-door tactics people often associate with proselytizing.

“I do come down on the side of works,” Stookey said, referring to the notion that doing good is at least as important as believing the right things. “I think faith without works is pretty much dead.”

“I think the word that I’m searching for here, and that has almost become a mantra for me, is ‘authenticity,’” Stookey said. It’s an idea he’s carried into the way he handles the business of his career in the music industry.

Author with a capital A

Arguably, Noel “Paul” Stookey’s most popular song as a solo artist is “The Wedding Song (There Is Love).” But after playing it for the first time at Peter Yarrow’s wedding ceremony in 1971, Stookey essentially donated the song to charity, creating the Public Domain Foundation to collect and redistribute the royalties.

“The Wedding Song” probably could have been a steady source of income for Stookey. But he has no regrets.

“But I really had no choice,” he said, and his wife — who became an ordained minister in the 1990s — came around to the idea.

“The fact is, if I was going to be really authentic, which I’ve told you is already a thirst of mine, I had to give ownership to the song where it belonged,” Stookey said.

Sometimes he writes from observation, sometimes from his own emotional response. But that was not the case with “The Wedding Song.”

“If I write from a place that’s prayed for, I don’t feel like I wrote the lyrics,” he said. “This was a song where the melody and the words arrived simultaneously and in response to a direct prayer asking God how the divine could be present at Peter’s wedding,” Stookey said. “The words are just so transparently from the ‘Author’ with a capital A.”

Brian Mackey can be reached at 217-747-9587.

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